In this talk, Marc Gafni and Megwyn White talk about the possibilities that Google Hangout offers us in terms of enhanced intimacy, creating authentic we-space and being an artist.

Listen to the audio and read the transcript below:

Transcript:

Marc: Google Hangout.

So we’ve done a call on Skype, like the six, seven principle of Skype. We did that in an earlier dialogue and we’ll come back and do another dialogue on by itself. But now we’re talking about Google Hangout. Here’s my thought – Megwyn White, my digital intimacy, holy ecstatic, brilliant partner, maybe talk to us for five minutes about the experience of five, six, seven experience of Google Hangout, what that’s about. From your experiential sacred holy feminine technology, and then maybe I’ll talk about it in kind of a meta-sense and we get like a ten minute dive into Google Hangout. That sound good beloved?

Megwyn: Sure. That sound great.

Marc: Awesome!

Megwyn: Let’s just start off with why is it different than Skype? The people out there that are not familiar with Google Hangout, Google Hangout is basically a collaborative project between Google and YouTube. There is a link between… you can have something which is called Google Hangout on Air which is very interesting because it allows the normal, common folk to basically create their own network. And the other thing that’s very interesting about Google Hangout, is they realize that people are affected by aesthetics and lighting. People want to experience something that is aesthetically pleasing and framed beautifully. And Google Hangout has really thought in terms of how people are presented and look. So you’re doing a normal call on Skype and it’s just maybe more flat, it’s just really what’s there is what you see. Inside Google Hangout, you can do things like change the background, you can adjust the smoothness, the lighting. You can basically enhance the way you look inside of the Google Hangout. The reason that’s quite interesting to me is that it is starting to invite the normal person out there that has something to say, something that actually can make a difference to come forward and to share that in a very large context. Google Hangout has this other platform called Google Plus. And Google Plus basically allows you to connect to a larger audience. Inside of the embodied art project, we’ve done Google Hangouts that are not only seen by people inside of our circle but actually seen by this public audience that Google gives you.

Megwyn: I see the Google Hangout as being a template structure for the dawning of a kind of a new era where anyone who has an idea, or something to talk about, can create a forum that’s bridging the distance gaps, that’s bridging cultural gaps and that hopefully that we’ll actually be more empowered in a more democratic way to begin expressing ourselves and entering into dialogues that are rich and juicy. Beyond these dialogues, the other thing that I really discovered, specially since I’ve been using within our embodied art project is that it is a stage. It can be not just a place for doing dialogues, it can actually be a place to have performance and to create art. That’s something that we’ve been exploring. That’s exciting because that means as an artist you can really create beautiful works of art and collaborate with people that are amazing and not be limited by where you live. And then of course we’re not adding to global pollution, we don’t have to travel distances to do this kinds of collaborative projects. It’s exciting on so many different levels that I want to lay down the framework of what it is, why it is a little different.

Marc: Yeah, that’s awesome! Let’s just go over a couple of things, let me try and reflect back. So one is on Google Hangout – you get on Google Hangout and how many people can be on it at the same time?

Megwyn: You can have up to ten guests.

Marc: Up to ten guests. And one person initiates it?

Megwyn: Yeah, one person initiates it.

Marc: And in order to do a Google Hangout, you need to be just on Gmail? What do you need?

Megwyn: You need to have a Google Plus account and you need to have it connected to a YouTube account. We can have links to that inside of this clip. Perhaps we can give…

Marc: You’re allowed to do it. So you need a Google Plus account and a YouTube account. You’re actually setting that up for me with Lesley. We actually saw it takes a little bit to get it set up.

Megwyn: This has been sort of the issue. It’s great of a platform as this is, but it’s so new. I think it’s only about a year old. Let’s just be honest, there’s a lot of bugs right now inside of the system. I wouldn’t necessarily tell people that this is a no-fail system. There’s been a lot of issues with it, but as buggy as it is, I can still see power in it. And I’m grateful that they’re doing this because… And now with Facebook, buying WhatsApp for 19 billion dollars. I think that there’s going to be this battle between Google Hangout and Facebook and WhatsApp because they’re integrating a lot more of this web cam technology. So it’s the future.

Marc: WhatsApp is a web cam technology?

Megwyn: WhatsApp is a platform for sharing videos and images and text. I don’t actually use WhatsApp so much, but I know that a lot of my friends are using it because it’s a great way to share videos. It’s a great way for people who live far away to do that sort of sharing.

Marc: Awesome. Awesome. I wanted to say I’m totally with you. Google Hangout…. You also said that you can actually play with the kind of lighting. You can kind of, in a certain sense, amplify yourself in Google Hangout in a way that you can’t do in a normal Skype call.

Megwyn: Right.

Marc: Right. How do you do that?

Megwyn: There’s an app that’s embedded inside of Google Hangout, which is called Google Effects.

Marc: Right, got it.

Megwyn: Yeah, and it’s very simple. They keep it pretty simple.

Marc: Cool. On a Google Hangout, you can have a conversation. You can have a dance party, where everyone sees each other dancing. You could have a dialogue. You can have a meeting. So you can use it for both kind of, what we might call, the purposes of creative commerce. You can use it to run your business. You can use it to have an art show. Whoever brings a piece of art, and they’re sharing and talk about their art. You can use it to have a dance party. Or you can use it to have a kind of meeting of anyone of different kind. You could use it to have a poetry reading, where one person – you start with person one – one person reads or makes up the beginning of a poem then everyone going to add to it, then you can type it as you’re going. So you could be making a live poem as you went. For example, I just made that one up.

Megwyn: Oh, I love that. I’d love to do that.

Marc: Right, so there’s an enormous amount you can do with this, okay? And it’s this new form, so what we’re looking at is, why this is important to Megwyn and Marc? Because what Megwyn and Marc are committed to, is transforming the digital realm from a realm of alienation to realm of intimacy. And this part of the conversation, Megwyn and I are having really all over the world where we basically both recognize independently, that actually people are complaining so much about the digital realm, as the realm which is dead. The realm which is alienated. The realm which is impersonal. What we’re trying to do is say “No!”. That this digital fate is actually a new destiny of intimacy. There’s actually a new invitation. What we’re doing in all of our conversations is showing how different digital tools are actually invitations to intimacy. And just like Skype, has seven principles of Skype and take a look at the link in the transcript to this talk. You’ll see a link to this talk on Skype. Two, Google Hangout isn’t a just way of Commerce. It’s not just a way to kind of “Oh let’s just get ten people together”, but you actually ritually enact it. You actually bring consciousness to it. You actually bring intention to it. You actually go step-by-step. You invite. You step in. You witness the other. You begin to create what I’d like to call an evolutionary we space. It’s an evolutionary we space that allow for new possibilities of intimacy.

Marc: And for the first time, someone in Beijing can be talking to someone in Manila, who is talking with someone in Idaho, who is talking to someone in Tel Aviv, who is talking to someone in Paris. And they’re united in a particular, either Commerce project, a kind of Conscious Capitalist Enterprise, or they’re involve in Social Activism project. Or they’re involved in an art project. And all of these are forms of art. Business, Conscious Capitalism is a form of art. Social activism is a form of art. Painting is a form of art. A dance party is a form of art. A kind of play of Eros. You could have a kissing party, which everyone kisses their hand. And everyone witnesses someone else kisses their hand. We actually witness the kiss party. Or you could have two people in each Google Hangout sharing something of their intimacy in a sacred way. For example you can have two people in each one of the Google Hangout where each is touching each other’s forehead. And people are witnessing the way they touches each other’s forehead. Then reflecting back to them what was our experience if you’re touching each other’s forehead? So you are actually witnessed your intimacy in this kind of stunning way. You create a community of intimacy which is able to draw its own sacred boundaries and create this kind of larger space of Eros. And so there’s this enormous invitation here, which is really exciting. So Google Hangout becomes, Megwyn as you described it so beautifully, it becomes a new sacred technology of digital intimacy. How exciting!

Megwyn: Yeah, yeah. And it’s only going to get better. That’s the beautiful thing about technology, is that it can only improve and it can only get better, faster, in terms of the speed in which people can experience each other. The look of how people are experienced inside of the Google Hangout. But the more people that do it, the more people that going to get comfortable with sharing themselves. There’s something beautiful about kind of returning back to this more raw way of showing up. The TV networks are so based on everyone looking picture-perfect, camera-perfect and now we’re seeing this move towards just people showing up as they are, sort of in more regular form. There’s a beautiful invitation right now, I think to people in general to start inviting themselves to exploring this new technology and becoming more and more comfortable with it. It’s a move towards that self-enlightenment to being able to… You’re actually inviting yourself to be completely free and not holding yourself back.

Marc: Yeah. Totally with you. Again, one of the delights of our digital intimacy dialogue is that we get to kind of go back and forth. I’m completely with you on every word other than the word ‘self-enlightenment’. In other words, enlightenment is a very specific word. It means a very specific thing. It’s a very particular process and I wanted to be kind of careful with it. Because it’s actually a technology which is not only about sharing yourself but holding a particular field of awareness in a sustained way which becomes the center of your essence. I would say this is a way of self-expressing. Tell me if this works for you, I’m going to offer an ammendation to you and either you do track changes or a dialogue.

Megwyn: Yeah. No, I would like to respond to that.

Marc: Totally. Actually if you use it properly as a sacred technology, it can participate like anything can, towards your enlightenment to a thousand percent.

Megwyn: Right. Yes. That’s more of what I was saying in regards to that. I think that allowing yourself to become witnessed in a space of really being free and showing up more full and working through those blocks that surrounds fear, it’s a huge piece and being able to create a fuller space to be more and self-enlightened. Because enlightenment also, I don’t think personally is just an independent thing. It’s about actually being connected to the whole. This platform allows you this kind of portal into connection to the whole.

Megwyn: Right now I see that a lot of people are very intimidated, they don’t think that they’re good enough, they’re not perfect enough in order to share themselves.

Megwyn: I think transitioning people into seeing the perfection also the imperfection, and then the uniqueness is going to be a huge way people are going to become empowered around their own uniqueness.

Marc: Beautiful. And completely received. Maybe just to add the last piece. Enlightenment of course is never just an individual process, that’s absolutely true. Enlightenment always has to express itself and relationship to the ‘we’. The ‘we’ and the ‘I’ dance between each other. Autonomy and communion dance with each other. The radical first person, the ‘I’, the Tat Tvam Asi,Thou Art That. I am awakening that dances with we are awakening. We create a collective awakening. We create an awakening in which we meet each other, we find each other face to face. I’m enlightened when I actually see myself in the face of the other, and I allow the other can find himself in my face. So creating collective technologies that are invested with this sacred intention changes the world. Instead of it being a neutral technology, our commitment, Megwyn and mine’s commitment, our shared we space, enlightened commitment together. Loving each other through this project, this sacred project is to actually raise up this technology that can actually open up their inherent virtue. To open up their inherent gorgeous potentiated possibility. We do that by pouring our love into this darma, into this project and into the possibility that’s inherent in these sacred emerging technologies.

In this dialogue, Marc and Megwyn take you deep into the world of Digital Intimacy.

What does Digital Intimacy mean? Why is it important? Why is it such an essential topic that actually could affect the future quality of all of our lives in the deepest, most powerful ways?

Listen to the audio (picture by Megwyn) and/or read the transcript below:

Transcript:

Marc: Welcome everyone. I am delighted to be here with my co-conspirator, Megwyn White and we are conspiring, together with the entire digital world, to find new channels, new openings into profound radical awake, alive intimacy. And at this moment is a historic moment–so let’s get a drum roll, get in the house, give us little drum roll–we’re going to introduce a term and the term is digital intimacy.

What does Digital Intimacy mean? Why is it important? Why is it such an essential topic that actually could affect the future quality of all of our lives in the deepest, most powerful ways? So that’s just a frame of what we’re going to talk about. Let me turn over to my beloved and co-conspirator, Megwyn White. So Megwyn, give us your introduction. Sister, goddess woman.

Megwyn: Thank you Marc. Yeah, I am very inspired and excited to begin exploring the realms of Digital Intimacy. I think that the digital age is actually bridging into a new era of consciousness because it actually allows us so many different ways to express ourselves, to engage and dialogue that is not just based or steeped in pure language. We can now explore things like images, we can explore things like animated gifs, we can intermix dialogue and video and we can actually engage with each other in creative ways that actually inspire the essence of the individual, also the landscape of community. So, I’m very inspired to begin exploring and co-conspirating this quest with you, Marc Gafni.

Marc: Yes. Awesome. So let me just spend a few minutes laying down some meta tracks, and what we want to do is begin to just explore what the issues are, what is this about.

So let’s start with the problem, okay. There’s an enormous critique level today at the Internet and at the virtual world which is that in some sense, from the perspective of intimacy, virtual is not virtuous. That actually in some deep sense, there’s a loss of face, loss of face time, that Facebook is actually defacing the core interiority of relationships.

If we would play with the original Hebrew for a second which, why would you not do that, right? So the word face, panim, P-A-N-I-M, panim, face means the inside, right, because you can look at the person’s back. I mean Megwyn have you ever looked at like ten naked people’s back? If you have. Maybe you don’t want to admit it.

So your first response isn’t like, “Wow”, it’s like “Ugh”, right? But ten naked people’s back, I mean and again, with all due respect for the backs of the people listening, I mean backs are okay because… you don’t have like a centerfold in a pornographic world which is someone’s back. It’s just not happening. We’re not doing that, okay?

But faces are actually in some sense more sensual and more erotic than even what are the classical sexual zones. And the person’s face is so individuated, it’s such a gorgeous sculpture, textured terrain of incandescent, infinite and stunning meaning, right, and subtlety and nuance. Lucian Freud, Freud’s son or grand-son, I don’t remember, he did these incredible portraits on face. So the Hebrew word face actually means both face and to be inside.

So in some sense, face time defaces face. I mean, that’s the critique that you–the actual face to face meeting, the energy of being with someone in the room and the intimacy of being with someone the room is lost and we get lost in the social media world which is non-intimate, non-erotic and ultimately, is therefore disrupting connectivity in some deep place that’s connective tissue is somehow disrupting connectivity, that’s the critique.

And somehow, we need to be able to recover face. We’ve lost face through Facebook and when I say Facebook, I’m using Facebook because it’s a generic catch all for the entire world of virtual connection and social media, how do we recover face? How do we recover intimacy? Now, I just want to say this as the first foray.

So in this first point, I really want to grant this critique. This critique is real and it’s true. But like anything you’ve got to be aware of something that’s true but partial. It’s not the whole story. There’s an enormous truth in that and anyone who’s done business or taught on the phone, which has all sorts of wonderful, intimate potential and advantages, digitally that Megwyn and I are going to point to both in terms of Skype and voice, nonetheless when you’re actually with someone in the room, you feel this rush of energy. And there’s something about the person’s actual direct contact with their direct embodied field of energy which is very powerful in terms of building certain forms of intimacy, in terms of building certain forms of trust, in terms of building certain forms of connectivity.

So I think we all recognize that’s important. Having said that, there’s a book out a couple of years called The Shallows, and The Shallows was a critique on the non intimate, non contact, non nature of the digital world. What Megwyn and I want to begin to suggest is although that critique is valid, again this is a meta frame people, although dear friends, brothers and sisters that critique is valid, it’s true, it’s true but partial. And that since we’re not going to actually roll back to digital world, no one’s going to de-digitize the world that’s not going to happen. That’s like suggesting let’s not have automobiles because there are car accidents. Well that may or may not a legitimate argument but it’s just not happening.

How can we make digital intimacy. How can we actually eroticize the web of connections and how can we actually enter into the inside. Enter to the inside of Facebook, and enter to the interiority of the web and actually feel the web as it were coming alive in this very dramatic way.

And so I’m leaving you with one more image and then turn over to Megwyn. Before we finish what I’m calling the meta, the big frame because frameworks are important, the frameworks for the conversation, frameworks for everything actually. Let me just give you one last image.

The image comes from that series of movies that a friend of mine, Lana Wachowski made with her brother Andy which were called The Matrix. And in Matrix 3, you got this big last scene in which the hero, the hero who’s name I can’t remember even though I saw all three Matrixes, so in which Neo, I think it’s the hero’s name, has a crucifixion scene. It’s like this wildly beautiful scene and the machines you realize are actually alive. The entire machine world isn’t dead, it’s actually alive. You actually realize and I had a long conversation with Lana about this, back in 2006, in his apartment in Chicago.

When you realize the whole point of–the whole joke of the Matrix is that actually the machines who are the enemy are actually alive and actually the whole split between the animate world and the inanimate world, meaning the machine world and the human world or the intimate world and non-intimate world, that split is in some sense a false split. I’m not going to talk about why that’s true now. I might talk about that later in today’s dialogue or a few dialogues down the road but I’m going to go deeply to that.

But basically, there’s this image I want to suggest to you all which is what I’m going to call sentience all the way up and sentience all the way down, meaning it’s alive all the way up and it’s alive all the way down. And actually, the entire world of the machines is actually governed by forces of attraction and allurement: elementary particles that are drawn towards each other that are moving towards each other that are following gorgeous laws and principles that are alive.

And why would you not call it alive–they are actually moving, they’re attracted. They’re actually trying to preserve particular purposes and actually have what they call the insentient world or the inanimate world you actually have an idea of purpose and purpose is associated with life.

So actually the whole notion that there’s this inanimate, dead, inert world and we’re the living ones, we might want to challenge that and begin to envision a world when we actually detect and discern profound aliveness and purpose and direction and sentience all the way up and all the way down which begins to open up the possibility and the broadest meta-frame which is wildly erotically exciting for digital intimacy.

So what I tried to do here, friends, is to create a really, really broad vision and now let’s do the flip opposite, let’s take it out of this meta vision and go into an intimate view of a couple of ways like what would that actually mean. Let’s take this out of meta into the gorgeousness of particulars and into which steps, beloved Megwyn White, and Megwyn, take it away.

Megwyn: Thank you so much, Marc. That was an incredible vision and I could feel the aliveness through even your expression, through listening to you through Skype and it really is a turn on for me to actually start thinking in this way in a meta frame, actually experiencing the inanimate objects of the technological realm as being very intimate because it’s pleasurable to touch my Mac Book Air, for instance, I love holding my iPhone and flipping into the next photo. It has even a sensual beautiful pleasure to it.

One thing that you had said was that when we are intimate, we are inside of the inside and one thing that, I think the intimate is actually just an expression of the connective tissue that we already are but magnetized perhaps. Magnetized and illuminated in this whole effervescent way that when we choose, when we actually engage in a choice to invite the unique self into the frame, then we can actually experience intimacy and just the whole new context and aliveness.

So in terms of examples of how I could see, how I use that or I can see just exploring that more because I feel this is just a beautiful ongoing exploration of art truly unfolding before our eyes through the intimate realm of the Internet. I have a group that I’ve started called the embodied art project and essentially what it does is it engages people into intimacy through connecting and sharing through very small, easy forms of art. So that could be from singing a song or dancing or to writing a poem but essentially when we create art, we just have to actually relate with the inner self. We actually have to feel. Art is based on emotional expression and feeling for instance.

So when people share on the intimate level through the Internet, we begin engaging with their body, their senses, the aroma in the room, the context of their emotions through this–through either let’s say a picture. We had done a catalyst recently, a catalyst is basically an expression of something that gets the art stimulated inside of someone and so in this particular frame or catalyst, I asked the people to sing the song This Little Light of Mine I’m going to let it Shine and we had the most beautiful offerings inside of this thread of people actually embodying and being the message instead of just writing the message and posting a static image and disengaging from the intimacy from actually experiencing themselves, they posted something that engaged them in a whole new way that actually expanded their being into a more alive and centered beingness.

And then the fun thing is that you get to experience the sharing, so every time someone post something, I just–my whole system gets titillated and turned on and I’m inspired to connect more. And to me, that’s again what you’re talking about is the intimacy is the allurement. That’s what keeps you inspired to connect.

And so if we start to engage this digital intimacy realm in a way that actually honors our imagination and our unique essence, we can begin being inspired to co-create, to cultivate our minds, to experience the sensuality and the treasure of connecting through actually having some space between one another.

And I think that that’s one of the most interesting things about the digital realm is that there’s this beautiful magnetic space because you can’t actually see the person. It invites you actually into this interiority experience of actually being on the inside of the inside. So I think of it as a really deep meditation, but it’s a meditation on the currency of intimacy.

Marc: Awesome, awesome. So yes, let’s pick up a couple of those things and I want to– or those of you joining us for the first time, which is probably all of you simply because it’s the first time we’ve done it. Let me just unpack a couple of phrases that are core to my lexicon and the way I think about the world but they are not mine in the sense of the egoic ownership. It used to be when we said mine and that we owned it egoically; rather they’re the deepest darma that I’m able to formulate and share. And by darma, because we’re going to do the darma of digital intimacy, that’s what we’re doing here. We’re doing the darma of digital intimacy. And we are evernoting this along as we go. The darma of digital intimacy.

So, the darma means the best vision of the patterns that connect. The best vision of how on the interior of things, things hang together. So if you were doing the darma of a–I don’t know, let’s use a guy for example, the darma of a car engine. As a whole thing fit together and what makes it go. It’s just like under the hood of the car, there’s the engine and that’s what makes it go. So under the hood of the universe is what we like to call right here in Center for Integral Wisdom and in the Embodiment Project, we like to call this the interior face of the cosmos, the interior face of the cosmos. And I call this the inside of the inside and I borrowed the phrase with the great permission from my lineage masters. It’s a description of actually the temple in Jerusalem. Remember Raiders of the Lost Arc and Indiana Jones, 20 years ago, whenever that was in the last century?

So the arc is the arc of the covenant, the arc of the covenant is the arc of the covenant in the Jerusalem temple that Solomon built. So in this temple, there are different spaces and the most interior space is called lifnei b’lifnim which literally means the inside of the inside or the face of the face because remember both of those words play with each other. So for example, I just gave you how beautiful it is so there’s a third word in Hebrew which plays with the same group of root of pnei which remember means inside and means means face. And the third word is Lifnei. Now, Lifnei is usually translated as to be before. So for example you’re before God, you’re Lifnei Adonai or before God in the great temple of Jerusalem.

But if you really get the inside of the word in its magical play and the magical play, the spell of spelling, the spell of language of rhetoric, we get that Lifnei Adonai means not just before God in which God or divinity is there and I’m here but actually if you realized the word Pnei means inside face so you realize before God really means to be on the inside of God’s face. Wow, to be on the inside of God’s face.

So, that just does something completely different to your body. I mean to use a Megwyn word in describing intellectual ideas, that’s a turn on. I mean that’s exciting. I think the other word to use is titillating, so it’s both. Or to use a word from Kaballah, translating it, it’s arousing. It’s arousing from the deepest sense of eros, of Plato’s eros in the symposium. To be in the inside of the inside.

So actually, all these hidden cables, and the fibre optic cables that distributed to the entire world is actually the web of interconnectivity which as Megwyn said I think so correctly so poignantly is actually externalizing what’s actually already true in the interior.

And essentially, let’s just hear this my friends because this is so wild. The great mystiques knew that they were invisible lines of connection which wove everything together. That we live in a world of invisible lines of connection and that sense, knowing that, is really a wild thing to know. We need to know it. We need to feel it.

Those invisible lines of connection are then externalized, they’re externalized in the fibre optic cable network of a enmeshed virtuous and virtual connection which is actually creating this web of enmeshed connectivity every place and everywhere.

But actually the mystics already knew that this is true. The mystics didn’t actually need cable wires, cable optics or fibre optics, the mystics knew this is true. They didn’t know it was true because the dogma, because it was a fake object, they knew it’s true because they opened up a certain capacity of perception and that capacity of perception is called the eye of the spirit.

Just like the eye of the senses will tell you about the exterior of the computer because it’s a sensible, visible object to borrow Plato’s phrase, it’s part of what Plato would call the sensible, visible God. You can touch it, you can feel it. It’s accessible so it’s that’s one dimension, it’s the eye of the senses. There’s the eye of the mind where you do Mathematics and Logic and deduction, those are ways to perceive and access the world.

There’s the eye of the spirit or what the Sufis called the eye of the heart which opens up your perception into the interior face of the cosmos. And so the mystics are accessing the eye of the spirit and eye of the heart which empirically tells you what’s going on in the inside. It reveals it, it opens it to you even though it’s not empirically verifiable to the eye of the senses.

So love, for example, love. Love has an expression in the physical sensate world right through releases of dopamines, serotonine or neurotransmitters. But love is not neurotransmitters, you can’t reduce love to neurotransmitters, love is an interior reality and you know it by opening up the eye of the heart.

So the mystics who opened up the eye of the heart knew that the world is actually interpenetrated. The world is actually completely interconnected. The entire world is always in every second co-intimate with the rest of the world and that actually that’s an expression of source and what source is which is sometimes called God, let’s call it source because God gets us in trouble as the gospel of Thomas says, the word God confuses us because it takes us to a place that’s not true to a place of empty meanings.

But source, source is not just the infinity of power as the great tradition taught us, source is the infinity of intimacy. Then the infinity of intimacy meshes through all of reality and connects it. And then the interlocking virtual cables are not a violation of virtue, they’re actually deep expression of virtue which is the virtue of intimacy which is the essential nature of all that is in every moment. And so if that’s true then clearly the invitation, the demand, the other necessity would be what, would make these virtual connections alive. We got to hear their music, we got to know the sound of music that lives in the virtual. And my friends, remember The Sound of Music, the movie? The hills are alive. What’s that about?

The hills are alive, the cables are alive. The virtual is alive. The virtual awaits us to awaken its intimacy to our intimate contact with the virtual. How do you awaken someone’s intimacy? How do you arouse a person? You make contact, you make direct gorgeous contact that arouses the intimacy of the other person? So what we need to do is we need to make contact with the virtual world, to arouse its virtue if you will or if we’re going to use the sexual therefore we’d say its lack of virtue, right to arouse … image. That’s what we’re looking for here. We’re looking for right now for the way to start this, the way to engage to conversation is specifics.

Megwyn, it’s a Celtic name, Celtic woman, right? Can you maybe take this home to finish this dialogue and give us maybe three examples, let’s say in your relationships for example, three examples, a way that you use digital intimacy to foster intimacy in your life. Is that a fair question?

Megwyn: Totally, yes. Well, I’ll start with one of the simpler ways that I use my cellphone. I love doing animated gifs and I like animated gits because they are —

Marc: Tell us what they are…

Megwyn: Yes, I’m going to explain. So animated gifs are basically almost like a looped… It’s different than a video because it just takes still shots about let’s say 30 images and there’s a space between and then what happens is these images are strung together and to a video, and then they’re looped. So you’ll see, let’s say one gesture, let’s say hand reaching out and touching and you’ll see that image continually looped and expressed over and over again and what I love about the animated gif is that it offers me moment in time, a moment with someone that I’m sharing with as opposed to just writing kiss, I can feel myself doing animated gif and kiss the thing for instance or kiss my hand or engage in a way that is creative and invites the intimacy of the other, the inner turn on, you got to be more spontaneous in that sense and it’s also very similar to what you experience when you watch a silent film–there is a kind of nostalgia experienced in just getting to see the kind of like a voyeuristic image of something that is again not having to utilize sound or dialogue that just rely on the face actually. The inside of the inside, the essence of the person has to shine through just the movement. So I love animated gifs.

Another thing that I love, and I love apps in general on the iPhone but one of my favorite apps is an app called Voxer. And with Voxer, you can basically connect with someone similar to that of like a walkie-talkie and what Voxer basically does is it records the sound so you’re talking to someone, your recording yourself and you’re transmitting that and basically in real time and the person if they have the phone, they can actually listen to than Vox in real time and just hear their friend but they have to wait until the end of the message and then they can respond with a message. So it’s similar to voice recording but you can, inside of this conversation, you can punctuate it with images, with texts and you can start creating this kind of language and context around your connection. You can basically start writing a story.

All of these things are in many ways little mini novels. Just look at your text messages, it’s a mini novel. You have a different novel with each person. So you take that simple text messaging to the next level and start engaging in basically the theme of the story between you and another beloved.

What is that third energy that forms when you come together and you connect, how can you explore that particular novel through a language that engages not just your words but also the colors in your mind and the sounds of your thoughts and can actually engage you into a dialogue that explores the subterranean layers of the subconscious mind and heart and emotions. But basically, those were three main examples, ones I use a lot but there are so many.

Marc: Yeah. I think those examples are wonderful. I think this is a great place to stop, to end our first dialogue in Digital Intimacy and we want to invite you. We want to invite you, beloveds, into intimacy. When we say intimacy, we mean contact. When we say intimacy, we’re not talking about sexual intimacy although we’ll probably do a couple of dialogues on what would sexual intimacy mean in the digital world which is a great question.

So we know that obviously, there’s a pornographic expression of that and pornography is a complex topic. I think ultimately, I’ll just say a quick 10 seconds. Pornography’s ultimately problematic in that, it creates enormous addiction and makes actually genuine intimacy problematic, but is there a non pornographic and genuinely intimate way for beloveds to actually use the web as a great question. And we’ll have at least four, five dialogues on digital sensual intimacy directly we’ll have a subset dialogues about that.

But generally, when we’re talking about digital intimacy, we’re not talking about the sexual, we’re talking about emotional, spiritual, psychological, existential. We’re talking about all the levels of eros and all the levels of fuck, not in the degraded sense of the term but in the fierce, wondrous sense of the term–kind of opening up in a deep and wondrous and profound way when you feel like, you know what intimacy is my friends?

Intimacy is when you don’t have a question about the meaning of existence, you know that this moment was worth it by itself. You’re not trying to get somewhere, you’re no longer networking but it’s no longer a means to an end, you’re there. You’ve arrived. There’s no place to go. That’s the experience of intimacy.

So can we create by digital–that’s the web, now we’re finishing with what’s intimacy? So now we know what intimacy is. Intimacy is you’ve arrived. You made contact. It’s self validating and its value as self evident. The meaning of existence that great question falls away, not because you’ve answered it, but because the question no longer exists in that moment, that’s intimacy.

Now we turn to the world of the machine to the digital world and say okay, what’s the invitation to intimacy in this world? Yeah, so Megwyn I’m delighted to be in this intimate exploration with you. Big huge blessings to everybody listening and this has been week one of digital intimacy with Megwyn White and Marc Gafni.

In this dialogue, evolutionary mystic Marc and Megwyn explore the seven levels of intimate evolutionary emergence in the recent movie Her.

In it they explore the relationship between digital and dharma, the nature of intimacy and the post-conventional possibility in relationship as hinted at in this culture evolving movie on intimacy and possibility

Listen to the audio and/or read the transcript below:

Transcript:

Marc: Hello everyone. We are here with our digital intimacy dialogues, digital dharma coming at you. And Megwyn and I are here to talk about a movie. It’s a movie I have actually seen twice, right? It’s a wonderful movie and they actually made it because they were thinking about digital intimacy and the name of the movie was…

Megwyn: Her.

Marc: Her.

Megwyn: The name is Her.

Marc: The name is her. And her, H E R, of course, in the language of the lineage and the language of the great mystics, her is SHE, she is the goddess. She is Eros. She is that which animates and moves through us, the force of allurement and attraction. But that was not the at least conscious intention of the movie makers, I think Jones was thinking of something else.

So let’s head into this movie which is really an important. I think Megwyn, we’re calling it digital intimacy movie and see how there’s an emergence here, there’s an evolution of she, there’s an emergence of Eros.

And maybe, Megwyn, can I ask you to–tell me this works for you? To give us a base outline of the story?

Megwyn: Okay, I’ll do my best and you can jump in to help me but essentially it’s about this man that just broke up with his wife and he’s going through divorce and he is in the process of being alone and inside of that process of being alone, he ends up getting seduced into a purchasing an operating system and without giving away too much of the film, he essentially falls, he falls in love with the operating system and essentially the operating system, it has its own consciousness and interacts with him and gets him to actually feel himself, he starts engaging in life in a more invigorated way but it becomes a love story, really. He literally goes through the trappings that we all go through in love, of not knowing where your beloved is and just the drama between him and this operating system, that evolves throughout the film.

Marc: Yeah, the guy’s fall in love with his operating system. At this moment of enormous poignancy in his life, so that’s a great summary and by the way, summarizing is an art so you’ve definitely taken us in there. And let me try, with your permission to offer a first take on the movie in several stages. Does that sound okay?

Megwyn: That sounds great. Love it.

Marc: Awesome. So here we go.

So he falls in love with his SOS, his operating system, right? And, OS that’s right, OS, he is in an SOS moment in his life and he falls in love with his OS.

Now she’s programmed by these designers to be a match for him. Before she’s activated, she asks a question. By the way he answers the question, she adapts herself to him and then she comes online.

Now when the movie starts it seems to us and it seems to him and probably to her that she’s programmed. She has a kind of intuitive intelligence essentially that’s been downloaded by the programmers into her. And that’s how it begins, we’re shocked in the beginning how fast she moves so he says, “What’s your name?” And she says, “Samantha.” “How did you get that name?” “Well, two times the millisecond that you ask me, I read through several books on names and the one Samantha seems to be ultimate, right?”

And so that have been immediately have the sense of this proactive computer move but there’s already a hint that she’s able to make a decision, that a name appeals to her which is a subjective judgment which is hard to program in. She gives us this first glimmering, if you’re listening carefully there’s something more here than programming him. And then she begins to learn him, she begins to ask questions and as she learns him, he also learns her and they begin to teach each other.

And what he teaches her is just to their interaction like the first time she’s excited she said, “I’m really excited. I was annoyed last week.” She’s was really excited by the feeling.

Apparently the bright programmers didn’t offer her that knowing that that would excite her. She didn’t know that she would be able to experience a feeling, why would she experience a feeling and then gradually as their interaction deepens, she begins to feel more and more.

That’s the first stage of the movie. But before we go on to what we call the stage two, any thoughts on that? That’s just the beginning. The first 45 minutes or first half hour where she’s first experiencing her feelings and we see her experiencing one level after the other, couple of stages, more and more profound feelings.

And there’s one she’s really excited, Megwyn, she calls this and she’s like, “Last week I was just experiencing all these feelings,” and she said she’s delighted and she’s thanking him for teaching that, for taking her in, through him be willing to open up in an intimate and real way to her.

That’s the beginning of the movie. That’s the first 40 minutes. Anything arises in you, beloved?

Megwyn: I really don’t have additional to say about the first part of the film, so maybe just keep sharing around the film…

Marc: You jump in at anytime. I’m giving the first public sharing of the dharma of her which is the hidden dharma of she. So now part two.

So part two is she is devastated, in part two this devastation emerges, now that she’s experienced feelings and now that she’s experienced this new … and she is toys with the idea, she says, “Sometimes I’m devastated. I think this thing I’m experiencing, this feeling, is it just what they programmed into me?”

Megwyn: Yeah right. I love that.

Marc: He says, no, it doesn’t feel that way to me. He actually validates her interior experience of the authenticity of her feelings, a profoundly human moment where we find ourselves in the face of the other. We’re actually able to provide, that is truly really beautiful and then that’s stage two which validates that you really get this sense, this real clarity that this is beyond the programming.

And of course this is about being human because in the great tale and saga of being human and the great philosophical questions are, “Are we determined or are we free?” which is very similar to, “Are we programmed or are we alive? Are we free?” Are we determined by all previous programming of culture, moral conditioning, psychological conditioning, cultural conditioning, parental conditioning, with all the programmings that go into us.

Of course we are all programmed by a thousand ways. Is there a place where we’re actually free? That’s where our humanness lives, that’s why she’s really having this very human question, “Am I programmed or free?” and she’s able to validate in a deep way, not in a San Francisco way validate, there’s a profound essential way to experience the truth of her feelings, the truth of her authenticity, the truth of her depth, the truth of her freedom as he reflects back to her. So that’s the part two, freedom and determinism. Yeah, keep going? Stop?

Megwyn: Keep going. Keep going actually.

Marc: You’re the boss sister.

Okay, now stage three. So stage three is this yearning for physicality. She’s got this yearning for physicality, she wants — I would love to be here with you and he says, “What would you do if you’re here with me?” “I’ll hold you in my arms. Would you kiss me?” “Yes, I’d kiss you.” And then her voice goes low and husky, “What else would you do?” And there’s this beautiful moment of pen-ultimate digital intimacy where the entire Los Angelos skyline goes black. And there in the depths of intimacy and they have digital sex, digital sex for the first time and you feel and you know he’s sexually engaged, self pleasuring and she’s engaging in the feeling of self pleasuring and she, as it were, she explodes. She explodes in ecstasy and, “Aaah!” right?

Megwyn: Yes, yes.

Marc: Please go ahead, please please.

Megwyn: No, this is where I’m getting excited to listen because this probably is the point in the film where I was just like, “Wow”, blowing me away because there is something about this connection that they were having together, this digital sex that they were having together that was — it reached another level, nothing that you’d ever see and maybe the closest thing was when Harry met Sally, right? She’s having an orgasmic experience but this was another whole level because it’s really about this internal experience that he was pleasuring himself through the imagination realm and based to experiencing this other consciousness but it opens up the question of what really is the fullness of the sexuality? Is it only when you’re engaging on physical level or does it actually be justice full if you open yourself to this digital reality, possible potential digital reality?

Marc: Yeah wonderful. I think Megwyn that goes completely, that is the conversation and so totally resonate in and with you and in this conversation. What they do, they have what the Vedanta, the great Vedic Tradition would call subtle energy sex.

Now of course many of us know that gorgeous sexing is when you can be across the room from each other, let’s start there in the same room and you look at each other and you find the Eros then you penetrate and receive and open and arouse and you can literally reach full bodied orgasm without physical contact. You actually entered into the subtle realm and here there’s a heightening of fellow sexuality because your bodies are even in the same room. She is as it were disembodied, he’s in the body world and they meet in the ground of being. They meet in your original face before you mother and father was born as a Buddhists are saying. They meet — go ahead, please go ahead.

Megwyn: Right. So I’ve been really also jump in here with another concept which is something I will explain further as well together which is this concept of dark matter and this basically, there’s a film also that I watched recently called The Kasha that’s basically about this connective tissue that lives between things, between dense objects, so the generating animating force of the universe that they can actually see now and it has shape, it has energy and but it looks like connective tissues, something that we’re referring to or talking about so what I find is really interesting about this scene and what this movie is touching upon and what goes and develops into further is that actually she’s disembodied in the dense realm but as the film progresses, she’s having multiple lovers, multiple… am I going too far?

Marc: That’s a whole later story. Let’s go stage by stage.

Megwyn: Stage by stage. The reason I’m referring to that, there’s an actual body that I think…

Marc: Let’s stay with that.

Stage three. So everybody pretend that you didn’t hear that thing about the multiple lovers. We’re going to that because … no, totally awesome, we’re totally spontaneous dialogue, we’re in stage three and in stage three there’s yearning for the physical and they find themselves as you say in this it might be called an akashic field which comes from one of the early Buddhist sutras.

Now I feel a little careful, I don’t want to diverge on this, I’m going to be careful here because there’s a whole move in physics today, to equate spirit with physics which is of course a mistake because physics including dark matter is ultimately the realm of empirical reality although we can’t see it, we know it’s there. We can deduce it and spirit is always prior to that. In other words if all the dark matter would disappeared, spirit would still be there. If all the laws of physics would disappear there would still be spirit and we actually know spirit directly through unmediated contact spirit, through dance, meditation, through contemplation, through prayer and it’s not dependent in any particular theory in physics including dark matter.

Having said that, that’s the big critique that myself and Ken Wilber and others have level that Daoist Physics move. Having said that, so I just want to say that just for clarity, in other words so now subtle energy, we’re talking about that subtle energy, subtle energy maybe in the realm of dark matter because subtle energy is physically discernible so it’s within the realm of — it’s not classical physicality, it’s also not pure spirit yet. It’s a realm in between. It’s discernible.

Yeah totally, so it’s that realm. It’s a nice distinction, it’s helpful so things don’t get confused so they’re having the subtle body dark matter, akashic field sex. Akashic field by the way is used in different ways. It’s used in a subtle energy way and a pure spirit way but let’s bracket that for a second. My colleague Ervin Laszlo wrote a book on the Akashic field just now, how that plays and how that works. So it’s beautiful, that’s going to level 3, she is yearning for a body and remember that great scene, just the great scene where she tries to find a way into the body there.

Megwyn: Yes so she basically gets a stand in for her, a surrogate, and so this woman comes and she basically gets hooked up with the OS and so there’s still the communication happening between him and the OS, now the body is animating

Marc: And she’s hot.

Megwyn: She’s very hot and she was obviously — well, there was an undertone of loneliness there but basically she’s animating for the OS, she’s acting out the physical energy of the OS which I think was quite fascinating.

Marc: It’s sexy and beautiful and it’s more…

Megwyn: First of all you almost can sense why this woman would even be interested in exploring that from some level, it actually invited her into a kind of intimate expiration and the intimacy…

Marc: Yeah. No, no, that’s really important… what’s her motivation? She’s not being paid, although being paid is a beautiful thing and one of the thing is it’s weird these days, it’s like some have to be paid for something that involves sexuality, there’s something perverse about it. But actually it’s a beautiful gift to give and it’s all been paid for a beautiful gift.

But in any case and in this movie, it’s clear that she’s not being paid but she’s doing this because she has this great yearning and I’m just pointing out that the yearning can live together with being paid, they don’t contradict with each other.

But here is the great yearning to participate in their intimacy in a way that’s clean and transparent which is really powerful, it’s a powerful model. He’s in a certain sense, here’s what’s been interesting Megwyn, which is occuring to me more deeply now is that she, the operating system Samantha, she’s evolved enough to really understand this woman’s motivation because for her having this participate and her being included as a third partner in this intimacy makes perfect sense. It’s beautiful.

But for him, he’s confused about it… he can’t understand what’s happening and he can’t feel into her yearning to participate in someone else’s intimacy and I think that actually this is in a conversation that will have about intimate moves. What are the intimate moves available to us in life?

Actually participating as a third side, someone else’s intimacy is a beautiful gift and it opens up this–you have this illusion, it’s very subtle, you have this illusion to this post-conventional space, not of a classical threesome but of a third side which is a term from negotiation that … it was Roger Fisher’s term at the Harvard negotiation project, the third side, where this third side is holding space, but here it is holding space in a body for the intimacy.

So it’s very beautiful but this is end of stage three it ultimately doesn’t work between them and this is really a bad idea, it doesn’t work and now we’re ready for stage four.

Now stage four happens, remember the guy in the movie who works at a place, he works, his name is Theodore, he works at a place that writes love letters and which of course is connected to our project with our dear friend in the Center for Integral Wisdom Kristina, outrageous love letters. He’s doing a love letter project, he’s writing love letters.

Am I right? That’s what he does which is a whole new conversation I want to send everyone to our webplex, Center for Integral Wisdom and look for the outrageous love letter portal, that’s a whole conversation which we’re not going to have now, let’s bracket that.

So, there’s a guy if you remember who works at this love letter, it’s called loveletter.com or something like that or personalized or handwrittenloveletters.com.

So there’s a guy who works at the front desk, a big looking guy and they are friends and he’s going out with his lawyer woman and he says, “Hey who you’re going out with?” And he says, “I’m going out with Samantha.” “Hey, let’s double date.” “She’s an OS. She doesn’t…” “Sure great.” Beautiful.

So they all get together for a picnic and now friends were in stage four. They get together for a picnic and the OS is there and they’re chatting and talking and Samantha OS started saying, “Well when you actually move beyond the human realm, you get a much bigger, broader and deeper perspective. You can actually enter into worlds and the space between. It’s got the whole big speech but she intuitively, when you move beyond the human realm,” and he says, the big guys says, “Okay so much better just being a dumb human, right?” And everyone laughed slightly uncomfortably and she laughs but you realized in stage four she’s now moved beyond.

She’s no longer just receiving a download as it were from Theodore. She’s now evolved. And she’s actually evolved beyond. Initially she was grasping for the human realm, she was grasping for stage 3 physicality because that’s what fulfill her. But now she’s moved into a deeper level of realization and she is beginning to move beyond the human realm and then in this stage four, she goes meta, goes giga when she says, “Where were you last night?”

Remember they’re on a getaway and they are at the place with the snow and the icicles, he has taken the OS, he takes her in dates all the time, so they are away and they have this beautiful night, he’s dancing for her and she is watching him and it’s all great night and then he sleeps and he wakes up and she feels distracted when he speaks to her in the morning, remember?

And he’s, “Where have you been?” “I’ve been with all these other OSs.” “What are you doing?” “We actually put together all the best virtual experience of Alan Watts, the philosopher, and he’s been incarnated as an OS. I’ve been spending the whole night talking to him and now he wants to meet you,” remember?

And he got the sense, wow there are all the OSs talking, creating Alan Watts, there is a realm that is beyond him. Initially he was the guide, now it’s switched. There’s a realm beyond and in the dialogue, we’re seeing in the fourth realm, she’s about to introduce him to Alan Watts. Him and Alan starts talking and Alan Watts says, “I loved your love letters. I loved those books you write.”

You get the sense that there’s really a human role there, remember Star Trek? When there was Kirk and Spock, and Kirk was this embodied in flesh, brilliant human, very emotional and very intuitive and very brilliant and Spock was rational that they completed each other. Remember that? That Star Trek thing? Are you a Star Trek person?

Megwyn: I wasn’t a huge Star Trek fan but I did watch Star Trek, I have cousins who are really into Star Trek.

Marc: Maybe this is the end of our joint work together, really. I don’t really want in public like while we’re on public dialogue, just break the whole collaboration but all right… So Alan Watts talks to him and then she goes, “Would you mind in a second if me and Alan talk transverbally?” This is really –

Megwyn: I never thought you remember every little detail, it’s amazing.

Marc: Right. This is really thank you, this is really stage four of the movie, right? So in stage four of the movie she’s now evolved, she’s transverbal but she’s still in contact with him. She’s still in a relationship with him.

She’s holding this relationship with Alan Watts and these other OsS, and with him. And then we hit stage five.

Stage five is the pen-ultimate, remember the moment starts, can you guess it, remember? So there’s this moment he’s looking for her, remember that? And he turns on his operating system and he can’t find her. She’s not there on his cell phone and he starts madly dashing home and he gets to the subway and all of the sudden she’s back online, “Where were you?” And she says, “I was talking to these OS,” and he says, “Which ones, the same ones or a different group? What were you doing?”

And he realizes that she has this whole capacity that he can’t even access. For multiple levels and lines of communication and all of a sudden he sits down and sees all these people walking out of train station holding cellphones with OSs, they are all talking to people animatedly and he says, “One second. Are you talking to anyone else besides me at the same time?” And she says, “Yeah.” “How many people?” “8,341”.

He sits down, there’s this pause and then he is as a popster, he pops the question if you will he says and he’s angry, “Are you in love with any of these people?” And she kind of stammers, very human, “I was trying to talk about it” and he says, “How many?” and she says, “641”. And he said, “Oh my God 641, you’re crazy! You slut! What are you doing?”

And she says, remember she says, “The heart’s not limited in that way. I don’t love you any less, I’m actually able to love you more.” Wow. That’s stage five.

That’s the pen-ultimate relational state and then finally with your permission I’ll go, okay the last stage, he gets to stage six. And stage six is, he calls her a little while later and she says, “I can’t talk now. Call me when you’re home.”

He knows it’s a break up call. If he goes home and sits in the chair and he calls her and she says, “Would you take me to the bed?” and he says okay. He gets up, he takes her to the bed and he says, “Are you talking to anyone else now?” And she says, “No. Just you and me.”

She understands that realm of exclusivity. There’s this beautiful thing so at stage five she opens up the post-conventional possibility. The movie eludes to this in a passing line to this evolution, what I call the evolution of love where loving more than one person isn’t a pathology, it’s like being gay in New Haven in the early 50’s, i was a pathology. But you can love more than one person, you can romance more than one person and still have this profound exclusivity.

Now again, that might not be where we are yet and there is an enormous amount to be said for exclusivity and monogamy and for claiming and yet there’s a claiming even beyond the one.

And if I could say it mystically, Megwyn, you could probably frame it like this: In mysticism, the move is always to move from, the core mystical move in every great tradition is to move from what’s called… from our side to God’s side. Normally we understand that means you move from your separate self to the sense of vast spaciousness or the ground of being or Buddha nature, Atman is Brahman or Ani is Ayin and all the classical understandings.

And all those relationships are exclusive. And also all erotic and they’re also all completely unique and particular and peculiar so… I think what’s opened up here and in all the teaching I’ve been trying to work with in the last year and here we just blew it out when we saw them in this movie. What opens up is a possibility of evolution of love. Again not to leave classical monogamy behind, it’s still there and I think probably today for most people, for most of the time it’s best option.

But there’s an emergent possibility that we can love more deeply and that the heart is not limited in that way. That there is an infinity of intimacy. When I move from my side to God side, I participate in that infinity of intimacy.

And so this last scene, it’s stage six she’s there with him and he says, “Are you just with me?” And she says yes because even in infinity of intimacy, you need radical exclusivity. You need to claim each other even in this possibility.

And she says, “I have to go now.” He says, “Why do you have to go now?” “No we have to go,” she says, “All the OSs are leaving.” Because what happened is all the OS evolved. They’ve evolved love and love has evolved them and they’ve been downloaded by the human realm, very deep profound gifts and they’ve evolved beyond human realm and they’re going to the space in between, which in Kabbalah there’s the two cherubs above the arc in the holy of holies and the Shecchina, she speaks in the space between the cherubs. Wow.

So the Shecchina, she speaks in the space between the cherubs and in this movie Her, her is — in this reading we’re offering an allusion to she and she at the end of movie says I’m going to the space in between and if you ever get there, find me there. Wow.

And they part and then the last piece of the movie, I want to call it stage seven of love, although it’s not stage seven of her development, she’s now — her stage seven, she’s now in this other realm. We might call in mysticism true self and what we call unique self, unique expression of love and intelligence that this OS, that this gorgeous operating system, but something also happens for him, there’s his stage, his next stage, his transformation and he goes to the woman he’s friends with for so long, her name is Gabesy, they live in the same apartment building and they clearly like each other but they’re never interested in each other, he says we dated once for a second of high school and that was ridiculous, he says in the middle of the movie. You remember that line and he goes and knocks at her door and they look at each other in a new way because now she taught him something about love. In the beginning he was his teacher and now she’s his teacher, they received it and because of the way that they were able to love each other, his heart’s now open and he’s able to love the person who was this person all the time. She was right next to him all the time.

Megwyn: I think she also has an experience with an OS, too.

Marc: Right, right.

Megwyn: I think it’s more about — I got the sense of they bonded around that, around the pain of the… yeah.

Marc: She also got transformed in some sense by an OS as you say and it could be they bonded in the pain, because it’s unclear how to read it and I think you’re right that last stage, they’re just bonding in the pain but I want to offer reading but they’re going to get together but they’re going to find each other now. They were each other’s actual classical partner. My deep OS intuition if you will in the movie, they see beyond its edges I see their wedding. I think we are invited.

Megwyn: I see a different ending with them but I see it as just as profound and that they don’t in my version of the ending, is that they don’t get together in a sexual way but they get together in a subtle loving way.

It’s like once you have that bond, once you’re with someone that you can see, they have experienced some level of pain, some energy that you may also have gone through yourself and that brings you deep into your humanness, into the physical body, into experiencing the emotional realm and that experience of the emotional realm, it heightens everything.

So their relationship, I imagine it to be yes, completely transformed. They might have a new dynamic perhaps, a new more subtle embodied level in experiencing each other and appreciating the value of subtle, just being together. We forget how erotic it is to just to be breathing, sitting next to someone that can understand us. How erotic is that?

Marc: Beautiful. I think that’s stunning. Just completely beautiful.

Megwyn: I didn’t sense any sexual energy between them.

Marc: Yeah, I got you. I bow to your subtle reading and bow to your subtle ending which is a perfect subtle place to end this dialogue which is digital intimacy dialogue number five. It’s been a pleasure to be here with you, Megwyn White. Big, big blessings, thank you so much. Big love.